Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 7 May 1882

Quite a number of visits yesterday — among the new faces, M. Rehmann and Prince Guido Pignatelli of Naples. I used to see him and his father every day on the Chiaia, clean-shaven and accompanied by an abbé. It seems the elder has three hundred thousand francs a year and the younger, Guido, five hundred thousand — he has inherited from the Duke of Monteleone. The incomparable Aurore, sweetbriar, vernal apparition, and so on and so forth! Vulgo, Mademoiselle Troubetskoy, whom Étincelle glorifies with such intensive publicity — she did not marry Pomar; she is plain but pleasant, and her mother, the eccentric Lise, is forever chasing matches for this Aurore who must be at least twenty-four. But I have no idea why I am telling you all this... There were Mme Gavini, Odette, Engelhardt; Messrs. Engelhardt de la Tour, Pignatelli, Rehmann, Bojidar, Alexis, young Faure, Filippini... who else? And this evening the Gavinis are taking me to the circus. A new dress of grey cashmere, a fold at the back held by a rhinestone buckle, as is done on trousers. In front, a blouse without seams but fitted by another buckle which draws the folds down to the lowest point of the waist — this buckle is a pin fastened to the corset itself, so that all these folds never shift and the waist is very slender without a belt. These are my own inventions; my dresses get copied, but the others cannot carry it off.
"Mademoiselle will come to see you around five o'clock, and we shall order a dozen of those dresses... Only... For no one has Mademoiselle's style."
Only I shall wait — because if I go, all those women who spend fifty or sixty thousand francs a year, and the cocottes, will have the same dress. I do not spend a great deal — perhaps eight thousand francs a year, no more, at Doucet's.
But I was talking about the circus — yes, I have a grey hat equally ravishing in its distinction. Afterwards we go to Imoda's for ices; Géry is with us, and then Countess Walewska, wife of the former minister who married young Alessandro. She is sixty and he thirty-two... On the subject of well-matched couples there is also the household of Mme de Marcilly and Janvier... As Adeline was saying she looked like an old ruin, I called Janvier her curator. Besides, one can sometimes laugh with Adeline — it is old Gavini who is insufferable.
Oh! Yesterday at the circus was still nothing, but then we go to see the Courbet exhibition and afterwards to the Bois! At the exhibition I remain two minutes, because this awful Corsican was torturing me with his pretentious and idiotic remarks about the paintings — and then the Bois! No, I am truly to be pitied, a sensitive soul exposed to all these miseries. That man who nudged me with his elbow every five minutes to make some fatuous observation about the passers-by, and Maman's conversation! First it was that Napoleon III did a great deal for the beautification of Paris, and as carriages went past — many carriages with many children — she found some of the children pretty, and added: you see, these children are pretty — because there are children who are not pretty, but these children, now, are pretty children. And still ringing in my ears was Gavini's verdict before the Courbets: "Not the least bit clumsy!"

Notes

The Chiaia, a fashionable seafront promenade in Naples. ↩
Vulgo (Latin): commonly known as, in ordinary parlance. ↩
Étincelle ("Spark"), a society gossip columnist. ↩
Cailloux du Rhin: literally "Rhine pebbles" — paste rhinestones, fashionable costume jewellery of the period. ↩
Cocottes: courtesans or kept women of the demi-monde. ↩
A pun: conservateur means both "curator" (of a museum) and "one who preserves" — applied here to Janvier as the keeper of Mme de Marcilly's crumbling edifice. ↩
Gavini, the Corsican father of Adeline Gavini. ↩
Gavini's pronouncement — "ce n'était pas empoté" — is his attempt at an art-critical compliment, using the jargon clumsily. ↩